By the Candlestick concert, the Beatles detested touring

The Beatles' 1966 Candlestick concert wasn't a production triumph. The closest seats were 200 feet from the stage, and the music was inaudible.

The Beatles' 1966 Candlestick concert wasn't a production triumph....

On Aug. 29, 1966, the Beatles appeared at Candlestick Park - the final stop not just on the group's three-continent tour, but in their life as a touring band.

One of the first shows on the tour took place in June in Hamburg, the city where just six years earlier, an unknown band from Liverpool had played for strippers and drunks in the red-light district, sleeping a few hours a night in squalid cubbyholes while the sound of gunfire from Westerns playing in the movie theater next door came through the walls.

Now the four Beatles were among the most famous people on the planet, and their concerts were a crazed cacophony of deafening screams and fainting girls.

The group's two earlier visits to the Bay Area, in 1964 and 1965, had been at the Cow Palace. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters showed up at one of the 1965 gigs bombed out of their minds on LSD. It does not seem to have been an enjoyable experience. As Tom Wolfe wrote in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test": "CANCER - Kesey has only to look and it is perfectly obvious - all of them, the teeny freaks and the Beatles, are one creature, caught in a state of sheer poison mad cancer."

Actually, Wolfe's description of Kesey's mental state increasingly summed up that of the Beatles as they toured the world. Few of the 25,000 fans who paid $4.50 to $6.50 for tickets at Candlestick realized that the Beatles had come to detest performing in public.

For three endless, surreal years, touring had been the Beatles' life. They made multiple long tours each year from 1964 to 1966, through England and to America and various waypoints around the world.

Being on tour was a claustrophobic, hermetically sealed existence. As Hunter Davies writes in "The Beatles: The Authorized Biography," "They were trapped in their dressing room during a performance. There was the mad dash, guarded by hordes of police and bodyguards, to the hotel. There they stayed, with the outside world locked out, till the time came for the next move. They never went out in the street, to a restaurant or for a walk." (Actually, after one of their Cow Palace shows, John Lennon and Ringo Starr did manage to slip happily out to the Rickshaw, a Chinatown dive. But such escapes were rare.)

No fun anymore

Touring had ceased to be fun a long time ago. "For a long, long time they had hated what they were doing," Davies writes. "They disliked dragging around the world, appearing publicly in a glass box like a peep show. They disliked performing onstage in the same old way. They thought it was a farce, a mockery."

The fact they could barely hear themselves and played the same set list night after night degraded their musicianship. George Harrison, who detested being a Beatle more than the others, said, "We got worse as musicians, playing the same old junk every day. There was no satisfaction at all."

Starr was so bored he began playing only on the off-beat. At the 1966 tour stop in Hamburg, where the group played its customary 30-minute concert, Lennon told the fans with characteristic bluntness, "Don't try to listen to us. We're really terrible these days."

That 1966 tour proved to be the worst. In the Philippines, dictatorial first lady Imelda Marcos became enraged when the Beatles innocently turned down her invitation to breakfast. Band manager Brian Epstein's televised apology was mysteriously blocked by static, airport security disappeared, and the group and its entourage were assaulted as they tried to board the plane.

Fans chase bus

Things were just as fraught in the U.S., where outraged Bible Belters had begun smashing Beatle albums after Lennon was quoted as saying that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." Shaken by the hate mail he received, Lennon apologized, but the group was so edgy that when a firecracker was thrown onto the stage in Memphis, Tenn., they all feared for a moment that Lennon had been shot.

San Francisco was the 14th and final stop on the Beatles' 17-day U.S. tour, and the Candlestick show did not feature such high drama. But it did open with a weird mishap. When the group arrived at the ballpark in a bus, the gates weren't open and the driver was forced to careen around the parking lot, pursued by fans, before someone finally waved them through.

After a low-key backstage scene - Mimi Fariña, who was present, described the quartet as "calm and sweet and cordial" - the group took the stage just before 9:30 p.m., near second base, and tore into their usual opener, Chuck Berry's "Rock and Roll Music."

It was a very ordinary Beatles concert. The 11-song set list was the same one they played on most of the tour: "She's a Woman," "If I Needed Someone" (the only George Harrison song they ever performed in concert), "Day Tripper," "Baby's in Black," "I Feel Fine," "Yesterday," "I Wanna Be Your Man," "Nowhere Man," "Paperback Writer" and Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally." They didn't play any of the songs from their new album, "Revolver," which had been released in the U.S. three weeks earlier.

It was not an intimate setting - the closest seats were 200 feet away - and the primitive sound system, combined with the incessant screaming, meant that most of what they played was swallowed up.

On the soundtrack of a 1991 TV special about the concert, occasional bursts of familiar chords or vocals cut through, but the overall aural experience is like listening to a huge transistor radio in a field where hundreds of babies are being delivered. Still, for anyone of a certain generation, it is impossible not to hear the chiming chords that introduce "If I Needed Someone" without getting goose bumps.

No goodnight

Fittingly, the final word from the Beatles to San Francisco was about Candlestick's invigorating weather. "We'd like to say that it's been wonderful being here in this wonderful sea air," Paul McCartney said before the last number. "Sorry about the weather. We'd like to ask you to join in. Clap, sing, talk, do anything."

He was about to say goodnight when he caught himself: If the fans knew it was the end of the show, they'd rush out and block the group's escape route. They finished "Long Tall Sally," jumped into their bus and were gone.

End of an era

No one outside of the Beatles' circle knew it at the time, but it was the end of an era. With the exception of one performance on the roof of the Apple building in London in January 1969, the Beatles would never play in public again.

It is fitting that McCartney's concert Thursday will be the last event ever held at Candlestick Park. Perhaps this time, 72-year-old Sir Paul, one of the two surviving members of the rock band that changed the world forever, will bid the "goodnight" he skipped on that chilly night almost half a century ago.

Editor's note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.

Trivia time

Last week's trivia question: When and where was the first live bomb dropped from an aircraft?

Answer: In 1911, Lt. Myron Crissy dropped a 36-pound bomb on what is now the Tanforan Mall in San Bruno.

This week's trivia question: What was unusual about the security fence built along Chestnut Street for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition?

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book "Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco," awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: metro@sfchronicle.com